Articles
To Kill or to Complement: Three Technology Improvements in Foothills Seismic Imaging
Rob Vestrum and Jon Gittins
The nature of technology development is to improve on current, established methods. New technology can supersede older technology, but often the older method has certain characteristics– robustness, low cost, ease-of-use, etc– that give the older method longevity in the face of its upstart rival. When dealing with seismic data for…
An introduction to common offset vector trace gathering
Xinxiang Li
This paper is an introductory review of the recently developed concept of common offset vector (COV) trace gathering. The COV trace gathering is a 3D generalization of conventional 2D offset gathering. A COV gather is a similar but different representation of a common-offset common azimuth gather. For many types of…
Highlights of Petroleum and Crustal Framework of the US Chukchi Shelf: Key Results from the ChukchiSPAN Survey
Menno Dinkelman, Naresh Kumar, James Helwig, Pete Emmet and James Granath
he US Chukchi Shelf is a highly prospective petroleum province with estimated mean technically recoverable resources of more than 29 billion barrels (4.6 billion cubic meters) of oil equivalent (MMS, 2006). Because of the remoteness of the area offshore of northwest Alaska and the high cost of operations, there has…
Personal Professionalism and the Geophysics Practitioner
Tom Sneddon
Geophysics is a great profession. Much of the technology we Geoscientists take for granted has its roots firmly embedded in solutions to earth science’s problems developed by geophysicists. This is certainly true in the Alberta oil and gas industry.
... Weed Awareness and the Seismic Industry
Andrew Stiles
The Seismic Industry prides itself on having a relatively small environmental footprint and an attitude of continuous improvement. Setting up our project areas to renew themselves through natural processes is always the desire d outcome. When we look at the two biggest human initiated threats to biodiversity, we come up…
Oil Sands Reservoir Characterization. An Integrated Approach.
Laurie Weston Bellman
The Athabasca oil sands contain more than a trillion barrels of oil within the Cretaceous McMurray Formation of northeastern Alberta. In most of the oil sands area, the McMurray Formation is generally considered to be a compound estuarine valley system characterised by multiple cuts and fills. It is bounded below…
Calibrated AVO and LMR analysis using a new DHI flat-spot AVO class 6 fluid contact to mitigate reservoir risk at Stonehouse, offshore Nova Scotia
Bill Goodway, Chris Szelewski, Steve Overell, Norm Corbett and Terry Skrypnek
This article describes the Amplitude Variation with Offset ( AVO) and Lambda-Mu-Rho (LMR) analysis that followed the Pre-stack Depth Migration (PSDM) of a 2,000 km2 3D covering the shallower, prospective part of the relinquished deep water Stonehouse license offshore Nova Scotia.
... A wavefield extrapolation based summation for prestack depth and time migration
Jianhua Pan and Dan Negut
Wave equation migration (WEM) has been used in our industry for several years. Its ability to handle multiple arrivals from a surface position to a subsurface point provides us with higher quality images than Kirchhoff migration. However, apart from computational efficiency, WEM lacks some other advantages of Kirchhoff migration such…
It Pays to Plan
Brock Hassell, Ken Robinson, Cecelia Gowen and Darrell Daniels
We are heading into another winter operations season, and it appears as if the industry is going to be at least as busy as last year, and perhaps even more so. For those of you who are planning winter programs now is the time to ensure you’re maximizing the benefits…
Aggressively Passive: Microseismic opportunities over an oilfield’s life
Peter Duncan
Passive seismic, especially microseismic monitoring, is to conventional seismic as a stethoscope is to a sonograph. It is continuous 4-D. It is accomplished by listening carefully to the sounds emanating from the earth and then diagnosing what is happening down there. Passive seismic techniques not only can create an image…
Highlights of Petroleum and Crustal Framework of the Beaufort-Mackenzie Basin: Key Results from BeaufortSPAN East Phases I and II Surveys
Menno Dinkelman, Naresh Kumar, James Helwig, Pete Emmet and James Granath
The Beaufort-Mackenzie basin in Arctic Canada is a petroliferous province still in the early stages of exploration. Almost three decades of exploration in the Mackenzie Delta onshore and shallower water offshore have resulted in 48 conventional oil and gas discoveries. Although no significant production exists as yet, mean undiscovered resources…
CHORUS Heavy Oil Research Project Sings The Happy New Technology Tunes
Joan Embleton and the CHORUS team
As the world oil situation becomes a larger economic focus for billions of global consumers, the CHORUS University of Calgary research project has expanded its integrated science international industry research team and heavy oil international sponsor focus to address these needs. Global energy consumption is on the rise; however, conventional…
Geoscience of Climate Change: Understanding the Climate System, and the Consequences of Climate Change for the Exploitation and Management of Natural Resources
Andrew Miall
The modern world is faced with two significant and interrelated problems: a climate system that appears to be undergoing rapid change, and a growing economy that will soon have to deal with the rapid depletion of its most important energy source: readily available and inexpensive oil and gas. A survey…
Seismic Modeling of Reservoir-Scale Heterogeneities—an Application to the Mallik Gas Hydrates, Northwest Territories
Jun-Wei Huang, Gilles Bellefleur and Bernd Milkereit
An algorithm was developed to construct heterogeneous petrophysical reservoir models based on well logs showing power law features and Gaussian or Non-Gaussian probability density distribution. The algorithm honoured the statistical features of well logs such as the horizontal and vertical characteristic scales and the correlation among rock properties. Multi-dimensional and…
The impact of oil viscosity heterogeneity on production from heavy oil and bitumen reservoirs: Geotailoring recovery processes to compositionally graded reservoirs
Ian Gates, Jennifer Adams and Steve Larter
The majority of the world’s petroleum resources are contained in heavy oil and oil sand reservoirs. Average recoveries from heavy oil and oil sand reservoirs are typically low ranging from 5 to 15 percent for cold heavy oil production and from 30 to 85 percent for steam-based in situ processes.
... Exhibits Make 2008 ‘Kids in Science Program’ a Huge Success
Pratt Barndollar
If you were on the exhibit floor Tuesday morning during this year’s Joint Convention, you may have seen a younger than expected crowd!
... Yukon Minerals, Oil and Gas Overview 2007
Mike Burke and Bernie Adilman
Mineral exploration in Yukon in 2007 continued its dramatic rise from the past few years, with an estimated $130 million spent on the search for base and precious metals, and uranium. Exploration for gold held the largest share of exploration expenditures (29%), followed by zinc and copper (23% each), silver…
Quantitative Interpretation of 4D Seismic data for Thermal EOR Applications
Keith Hirsche
The earliest 4D seismic field studies were designed to monitor thermal recovery operations in heavy oil reservoirs in the USA, Canada and Indonesia. Thermal recovery operations were chosen to demonstrate the viability of 4D seismic because of the large contrasts in the seismic velocity of the heavy crude as it…
Geomechanics Effects in Thermal Processes for Heavy Oil Exploitation
Maurice B. Dusseault and Patrick M. Collins
There is a great need for high-quality monitoring data from thermal enhanced oil recovery processes applied to heavy oil reservoirs. We need to understand the physical mechanisms, to improve our attempts at mathematical simulation of these processes, and to provide information for “real-time” project optimization.
... Mackenzie Plain/Great Bear Plain, NWT
Canadian Discovery Ltd.
This past winter no new drilling or workover efforts were licensed in this area of the Central Mackenzie Valley. Operators are still waiting to see what happens with the long delayed and still uncertain Mackenzie Gas Pipeline Project (MGP). This spring, it was announced that the cost estimate for the…
